Richard Ford
The Lay of the Land.
Knopf, 496 pages, $26.95
As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in “Manners” in 1844:
I have seen an individual whose manners, though wholly within the conventions of elegant society, were never learned there, but were original and commanding … one who did not need the aid of a court-suit, but carried the holiday in his eye … who shook off the captivity of etiquette, with happy, spirited bearing, good-natured and free as Robin Hood; yet with the port of an emperor, if need be,—calm, serious, and fit to stand the gaze of millions.
These words describe Richard Ford’s character. That’s not to say his temperament: He may be touchy, petulant, egomaniacal, fit to stand nobody’s gaze. He did, after all, spit in Colson Whitehead’s face in payback for a hostile review. Ford’s wife shot up a book by Alice Hoffman after she criticized Ford’s Sportswriter in The New York Times. Ford sent the pulped fiction to Hoffman’s editor. “I don’t read my reviews anymore,” he’s said.
Dr. Johnson remarked that a writer “places himself uncalled before the tribunal of criticism, and solicits fame at the hazard of disgrace.” Ford shouldn’t think himself beyond the reach of that tribunal—but let a guy go nuts from time to time. Nobody’s perfect, and that’s the cliché that comes to mind when thinking about Ford’s character: Frank Bascombe, hero of the trilogy comprising The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day(1995),
